


People Always Talk

by surprisepink



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Childhood Friends, Flashbacks, Gen, Pre-Canon, Pre-Timeskip | Academy Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Prompt Fic, The Great Fodlan Bakeoff, could be read as pre-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24638098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surprisepink/pseuds/surprisepink
Summary: Yuri evades. Ashe reminisces.
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	People Always Talk

**Author's Note:**

> My piece for The Great Fódlan Bakeoff, a 48-hour writing challenge. The prompts were: exploration, secret, ambition, devotion, and gossip.

People always talk, Ashe supposes, and that goes double after Yuri joins their class. He can’t blame them for it -- when he first met Yuri, he too was easily captivated. He still is now, but in a different way from his classmates.

Yuri joined up because of the professor, really. It's got nothing at all to do with the Blue Lions, and certainly not the least bit to do with Ashe, which is either a relief or distressing depending on how much Ashe thinks about it. On one hand, someone that he knew once so many years ago has returned to him; on the other, he's barely acknowledged that Ashe exists in the several days since they first reunited.

And Ashe would be inclined to think that Yuri had fully forgotten about him, only Yuri occasionally drops the barest of hints that he remembers: a meaningful, lingering gaze across the cafeteria, a comment in class that he thinks it’s _very_ amusing that Ashe is studying for his thief certification. And that's most frustrating of all -- knowing that Yuri must have his reasons and wanting to grant him the privacy he seems to prefer, but at the same time desperate to know more. He wants to know what happened in those years that made Yuri’s gaze even sharper than before, what injected such a venom into him.

He’s too polite to ask, though. It’s fortunate for him that not everyone is.

Hilda gets the ball rolling by interrogating Ashe, sitting down across from him in the Blue Lions classroom as he studies. She reaches across the table to pull his book away from his face, offering him a bright grin when they make eye contact. It just so happens, she explains, that she had overheard them talking, however briefly, in Abyss, and she absolutely must have him tell her “more about that charmer you clearly know -- no offense, I don’t trust him, but if you two are friends maybe that’s something”.

With nothing to hide himself -- at least not in this respect -- Ash tells all there was to know: that they had known each other as adolescents, that Yuri was an older boy that came from a similar background as him, and so he was easy to get along with. That they had been friends, sort of, and had drifted apart, absolutely, because that’s what happens between children who get along but depend on their fathers spending time together in order to see each other.

(Ashe wonders sometimes if he might have asked Lord Lonato to find more excuses to visit Count Rowe. He had regarded Lonato with equal parts love, respect, and fear -- of what? Being sent back to the streets as quickly as he had been taken in, he supposed -- and it had simply seemed like too much to ask of him.)

“Huh. And then Yuri moved to Abyss? Weird coincidence,” Hilda says, twirling the end of one pigtail with her finger. “But I guess not that weird. Seems like everyone who’s anyone ends up at Garreg Mach at some point.”

“You don’t know the half of it, doe,” comes a smooth voice from behind Ashe, and it’s obvious who it is. Ashe prefers not to consider how long he’s been listening. Yuri has always been the type to seemingly tell from a mile away when someone is talking about him.

“Oh, it’s you!” the ‘doe’ replies, her face all smiles. Much as she claims to not trust him, she’s good enough at playing nice. “Not to be nosy or anything, buuut… anything else you can tell me?”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that, you know.”

“Okay, tell me about you and Ashe,” says Hilda, who cares little about which of Garrg Mach’s secrets Yuri might know, but cares an awful lot about gossip. “Childhood friends and… come on, I know there’s more.”

Yuri grins like he has something to hide and they all know it. “Nope, nothing special. We were just kids who had something in common.”

“What, just being adopted?”

“Hmm, a little more than that. To be honest, we used to get into mischief together. Nothing scandalous for a pair of former street urchins, but enough to net us the occasional stern lecture from Lonato.”

“So there’s a story to tell…” Hilda muses.

Ashe's face flushes with the memory: he remembers precisely the occasion Yuri is referring to. “No, it’s nothing.”

...

It wasn’t the first time he snuck around the mansion; being accepted into Lord Lonato’s family not two weeks ago didn’t mean that Ashe didn’t feel like a stranger in his own new home. It was too big, too opulent, too easy to get lost in. Navigating the streets was something that he knew, but something about the mansion felt far more frightening. He had joined a new world, the world of nobles, and navigating the formalities of where he was supposed to be and who he was supposed to talk to and when he had to attend his lessons (and so on, and so on) was an unprecedented challenge

So when Lonato left him to his own devices -- which was often enough, he was a busy man -- Ashe took to exploring the house that was meant to be his home, feeling more like a trapped creature than the newly adopted street cat that he had more in common with. He stuck to the rooms that were accessible, though it would have been easy enough to pick the locks of the ones that weren’t. Logically, Ashe knew that it was best to not give Lonato any reasons to put him back on the street, even though sometimes his heart felt like that might be for the better, that maybe that was where he belonged after all.

That time was different. Lonato was throwing a party, and as Ashe’s brother and sister enjoyed being paraded around between his friends who wanted nothing more than to pinch their cheeks and feed them sweets and tell Lonato what a good, kind man he had been for taking the three of them in, Ashe could only feel a growing knot in his stomach. It was the dread of being a disappointment, the fear of saying or doing something wrong as he tried to keep track of the nobility’s many rules. The twins were young enough to have that kind of thing excused, but he was not.

So he slipped out, assuming he must be alone in wanting to remove himself from the elegant affair. Instead, Yuri followed him shortly after, and together they walked down the hallways. Yuri hadn’t asked if he could join him, and Ashe hadn’t minded; they had already been formally introduced earlier that night, and Ashe had immediately felt a kinship with this odd boy, though he couldn’t quite read his expressions.

They walked together, Yuri’s footsteps as quiet as Ashe’s down carpeted hallways and past vases that were worth more than Ashe’s parents had made in their entire lives. The silence was broken up by Yuri’s occasional inquiries, mostly about what each room was for, and Ashe answered most of them. Bu soon enough they came upon one of the locked doors

“What’s in there?” Yuri asked, already studying the lock, his slim fingers tracing the groves in a way that immediately betrayed his experience. All Count Rowe had said was that the boy had been homeless, but now Ashe’s sense of kinship was beginning to make sense.

“I’m not sure about that one,” Ashe admitted. “But… you shouldn’t.”

The older boy raised an eyebrow. “Why not? It’s not so hard to break into this kind of lock. I suspect you know that too.”

Nobody had told him about Ashe’s history with thieving, either -- Lonato thought it best not to spread the details, lest anyone think less of Ashe -- but it was like Yuri could see right through him. In time, Ashe realized that it was simply common sense that a street urchin would know how to pick a lock, but just then it felt like Yuri knew everything about him.

Why not indeed? Just a few short weeks ago he had no problem whatsoever with robbing Lonato’s home. Now breaking his trust seemed unthinkable.

“It’s not right,” was the answer he chose, which seemed at once correct and yet deeply hypocritical of him to say.

To Ashe’s great surprise, Yuri shook his head but stepped away from the lock all the same. “Well then, what did you have in mind? Or did we sneak away with no purpose? Though that might be fine too, I’ve had just about enough of nobles for one day.”

“It’s just, well…”

“You don’t have to agree with me if it makes you feel guilty, but I know you’ve had just about enough as well.”

Instead of answering Ashe reached for Yuri’s hand, and -- another surprise -- Yuri accepted it.

“Come with me,” said Ashe, and Yuri followed him, asking no more questions.

He walked with a sense of determination now, though he wasn’t sure where; all Ashe could focus on was the feeling of Yuri’s hand in his. Was it weird to do this with someone he just met? Was it friendly? Were his palms sweaty?

He hadn’t chosen it consciously, but Ashe found himself leading Yuri to a balcony far away from the dining room where the party was held. Here it felt impossibly quiet, the only sounds around them the occasional rustling of the trees, and the starry sky above them seemed impossibly large. It was hard to imagine that dozens of nobles were drinking the night away in another part of the mansion; it was hard, even, to imagine that they weren’t the only two people in the world. 

Thinking he must be silly to be pondering such things, Ashe turned to Yuri, fully expecting to find a bored expression on his face. Instead, he was enraptured, eyes wide and mouth beginning to drop open. Ashe found himself thinking that he’d like to see that side of Yuri again and again: unguarded wonder on what was typically a carefully guarded face.

There was magic in that moment, the two of them staring up at the skies, and he lost track of how long it lasted. It seemed like it would have been forever until the spell was broken by Lonato, rushing onto the balcony, voice filled with relief as he exclaimed that he had found them both.

The two of them received a strict-talking to after that, about not wandering off during a party of all times, because neither of their adopted fathers wanted to spend time worrying about them -- but we _are_ worried, you know that, don’t you? Yuri didn’t seem to be listening, and Ashe, for his part, was too caught up in staring at him to do anything more than nod along to what Lonato was saying.

That was the first and last time they held hands, Ashe remembers now.

...

Hilda wrinkles her nose at Ashe’s denial. “It sure sounds like there’s more to it,” she says, but doesn’t bother to push. Ashe expects it to stoke the flames of school gossip to be sure -- not that Hilda cares _that_ much, but she’ll probably tell Marianne and Claude, and the goddess only knows what will spiral out from that.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?’ teases Yuri with a chuckle.

At that time, Ashe had thought that Yuri shared his sense of kinship, but recently he hadn’t been so sure. Now, his curiosity has been awakened anew, and he swears to do his utmost to get to know Yuri: the new Yuri. The real Yuri, not just the boy he admired those years ago, but the wholeness of the man that he has become.


End file.
